Living the American Green

Ladies and gentlemen: step right up! Come see this marvel of the modern age! A vegetarian encouraging you – no, pleading with you – to eat venison!

I feel bad for deer. I do. They’ve got the short end of the stick at the moment. By no real fault of their own, they’re suddenly the anti-endangered species that it’s okay, even the cool thing, to want to kill. I know there’s the cute factor, which seems to be the only argument anyone ever tries to make on their behalf, but ask any ecologist and you’ll hear the whole litany of reasons that deer need to be taken down a notch.

this wolf is sad because she's locally extinct

Deer: the adorable forest menace

The backstory: we humans like livestock and pets. We do not like wolves and pumas. We kill wolves and pumas. Deer cease to have natural predators and start eating…well, everything. Deer become overpopulated and start starving to death. They eat the understory and keep entire forests from rejuvenating themselves, they attract ticks and carry lyme disease…yeah: pretty crappy to be a deer these days. 

Anyone who’s followed this blog closely over the last month (anyone? Bueller…? Bueller…?) will know that there is a mild disagreement between my humble self and our illustrious leader, the great and powerful LtAG himself – it’s a difference over the place of meat in the emergence of post-eco-disastrous American society. A difference of degree, really – there can’t be much logical dispute that as a culture we need to consume less meat – and while I personally feel that the costs of producing meat far outweigh the benefits, he’s more of the school that retains meat as the centerpiece (however diminished in scale) of the American diet. No biggie. There are fine arguments to be made either way, and I don’t sweat it too much.

But HERE’S the point, friends and family and awkwardly stalking ex-lovers: many of the most convincing reasons to avoid meat like the plague - immense wastefulness of water, energy, and arable land, unhealthy saturation with chemicals and hormones,  unsafe and polluting production conditions – go out the window when it comes to venison. Read on below…

Stepping up and scarfing down

Imagine, if you will, a suburban community of approximately 5000 people. The community is, say, an extended buffer zone between a city and a forest. Really, this isn’t hypothetical at all – I attended college in such a locale, and my grandparents live in another. Both forests are overrun with deer and slowly dying. But neither has an organized system for culling deer, other than periodically hiring sharpshooters to come in and take them out. More importantly, neither has an organized system for taking up our natural responsibility to fill in the predatorial niche that we have failed to inhabit after clearing it out. So even when we do occasionally try to mitigate the damage to the ecosystem, there is neither a benefit nor a consequence to the community. Nothing is changed – the decay of the forest is delayed a little longer.

EAT ME PLZ

So what would it take for the situation to be different in a consistent and lasting way? Most immediately – it would require the widespread acceptance that in the absence of these ecosystems’ original top predators, it is our responsibility as members of a bioregion to eat them as a regular part of our diet. I can hardly think of a more convenient turn of events for an eco-minded community. How do we begin to free ourselves from the wasteful and polluting processes of meat production without actually giving up meat? By changing the meat we depend on – from those that are overproduced and overconsumed to those that need to be eaten for the health of our ecosystems, to which we too frequently forget we belong.

Of course, this only works on a small scale. The meat industry in this country is so immense it would take far more wild deer and far more manpower than would ever be possible to satisfy America’s meaty desires. And the irony of all this is – if there were any widespread success in weaning the country from beef onto venison, we would simply see a neat restocking of the factory farms with deer, and before long many of the same dangers of industrial meat production would recur.

Everybody wins

But let’s go back to our suburban community. If even half of those 5000 people put venison on the table once a week instead of beef, a concrete change occurs at the local level. In poorer rural communities (such as near my father’s home in backwoods Maine), the demand for venison provides much needed capital for people with hunting skills, capital that stays in the community rather than being diffused to agribusiness. At the same time, there is now an organic and consistent (rather than periodic and unbalanced) balance in the community’s bioregion between deer, their (new) predators, and their prey – the forest understory is now less stressed and able to go about its natural succession. AND the consumers themselves have a healthier and more eco-appropriate source of protein than what you’d get at the grocery store or the local Arby’s. AND the deer aren’t starving to death.

So give it a shot! A few people here and there won’t change much, but you might as well acquire the taste for deer – because sooner or later, this is going to be the in thing. This only works, now, if venison consumption increases in the place of other, more unsustainable meats – no cheating and adding deer to your diet where nuts and fruit used to be. But I’ll tell you one thing. One thing you don’t have to worry about is that this won’t be a delicious experiment. Trust an otherwise-vegetarian on this one. Delicious indeed.

Who wrote this one?  Me: Cook, hiker, mushroom hunter, snowball fighter, lover of good coffee and cheap wine, enjoyer of the taste of tap water, wannabe Sicilian goatherd, comrade of big hairy spiders. You: widespread sustainable agriculture, bioregional community structures, innovative green-collar workforce policy, pesto sauce made by an Italian grandmother. Come over for dinner sometime. --- “A gastronome who isn’t an environmentalist is just stupid, and an environmentalist who isn’t a gastronome is just sad.” -Carlo Petrini, Founder, Slow Food Read more from this author